The Apple faithful have been suggesting that a refresh of the Mac Mini line is long overdue, and today we may have some evidence that Apple agrees.

Apple aficionado website MacRumors posted what they called a "possible image" of the back of the next generation Mac Mini. The image came from a poster in the MacRumors forums, who also threw out some specs. If you're in a believing mood, those specs are (quoted verbatim from the poster):

Intel Core 2 Duo

2GHz

3MB L2 cache

2GB RAM DDR III, 1066MHz

Super Drive is SATA

The image shows what appear to be two display ports (Mini DisplayPort and Mini DVI), a Firewire 800 port and five USB ports.

It should be noted that "Monthy," the poster who leaked the photo, is new to the forums, joining on the 17th of this month. This may or may not be significant; if it had been an established poster with a history of insider knowledge it would've made the story a bit easier to buy into. On the other hand, AppleInsider claims to have had access to a separate photo (that it was asked not to publish) that showed the same ports, which lends credibility to the story.

If Monthy is to be believed, the new Mac Mini "should be out in a month."

Honestly it isn't the Mac Mini that interests me about this story, it's how forum-goers react to stories like this one. Monthy posted that he'd seen the new Mac Mini and was greeted with the traditional "pics or it didn't happen" response. So he posted the image. Then the obligatory "nice Photoshop" comments followed (seriously, its like forum-goers are all reading from the same script). Finally "bensen," another forum member who joined on January 15th but never posted until today, did an analysis of the image, claiming one of the lines wasn't parallel and that the area around the ports were too clean, indicating that image manipulation had been performed.

It's fascinating to see the community-powered fact-checking at work in cases like this. I guess we'll know who was right and who was wrong in about a month. Stay tuned!